apres-ski means a warm chalet, hot drink, spa or dinner. To Simon Beck of Great Britain, it means creating intricate pictures in the snow. And not just snow angels: Beck’s snow art involves mathematical patterns and often stretches the length of several soccer fields.
"There’s a frozen lake outside where I stay, and one day after skiing I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to make a pattern?" he said. "I didn’t have any snow shoes, just walking boots, but the snow wasn’t too deep and it worked perfectly well."
He’s been doing it ever since, and recently collected 200 of his favorite images in the book "Snow Art" .
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COURTESY SIMON BECK

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After Beck read New York Times reporter James Gleick’s book, "Chaos: Making a New Science," he started incorporating mathematical patterns into his work.
"That’s part of my inspiration," he said.
The Koch curve snowflake shown here is one of his favorite patterns.
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Courtesy Simon Beck

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Beck has been creating snow art seriously for about five years. One of his favorite patterns to stomp, shown here, is based on the Sierpinski triangle. "It’s quite easy to do, and it makes a good impact," he said. "I also use it as one element in larger works."
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Courtesy Simon Beck

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Pictured, a Sierpinski circle displayed, briefly, at a ski resort in 2014.
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COURTESY SIMON BECK

View Caption+#5: Beck also likes to make patterns that are variations on the

Mandelbrot set . He created this one, shown here after 26 hours, in a total of 32 hours over three days.
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Courtesy Simon Beck

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“The biggest was about 10 soccer fields,” he said. “It’s a bit hard to measure, but a decent-sized project is about three soccer fields. That takes one day if conditions are good.”
Good conditions mean 6-inch deep snow, or 6 inches of powder on top of a firm base.
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Courtesy Simon Beck

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"Quite honestly, once I have good photos I don’t care how long they stay around for," he said.
Beck does most of his work in a French ski resort where he spends his winters. Frozen lakes are ideal. In those kinds of conditions, he’ll make do about two projects per week, posting photos on Facebook.
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COURTESY SIMON BECK

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Beck also occasionally works on commission, creating logos in different locations.
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Courtesy Simon Beck

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Beck, a map-maker by trade, says the designs come naturally.
"It’s just like map making," he said. "It’s the same process, in reverse."
Bonus: the walking keeps him in shape. "I don’t need to do any exercise apart from snow art," he said.
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Leonardo Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" painting may be part of the oldest 3-D artwork, say two visual scientists.

In 2012, scientists discovered that beneath layers of black paint, a seemingly insignificant "knock-off" of the "Mona Lisa" in the Museo del Prado in Madrid was in actuality very close to the original hanging in the Louvre Museum in Paris, revealing the same subject with the same mountain landscape background. That painting may have been painted by Da Vinci or possibly one of his students.

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Rex Stucky/National Geographic/Getty Images

"When I first perceived the two paintings side by side, it was very obvious for me that there is a very small but evident difference in perspectives," study researcher Claus-Christian Carbon of the University of Bamberg in Germany wrote in an email to Live Science. "Maybe the view of a perceptual psychologist is highly sensitive for such tiny differences, but it is very clear that also persons who are not so strongly involved in perceptual sciences can see it easily after having received information on the change in perspective." [See Images of "Mona Lisa" Paintings in 3D]

Turns out, the real "Mona Lisa," or "La Gioconda," and the Prado cousin were painted from slightly different perspectives. Carbon and Vera Hesslinger of Germany's University of Mainz figured out this perspective shift by looking at so-called trajectories, or the paths from a distinctive point on the source, such as the tip of Mona Lisa's nose, to a target, or the observer's (or painter's) eyes. The scientists also asked people to estimate the perspective of the "Mona Lisa" sitter, something Carbon called a psychological assessment of the perspective.

"This is particularly clear if you observe the chair on which La Gioconda sits: In the Prado version, you can still see the end of the end corner of the chair at the background of the painting, which you cannot see in the Louvre version, because the painter of the Prado version looked at the' Mona Lisa' more from the left than the painter of the Louvre version," Carbon said.

The researchers then could recalculate the position the painters took relative to each other and to the "Mona Lisa" sitter in Da Vinci's studio. They found that the horizontal difference between the two paintings was about 2.7 inches (69 millimeters), which is close to the average distance between a person's two eyes. (When a person observes an object, each eye sees a slightly different perspective of the object, both of which are sent to the brain and transformed into the three-dimensional representation of the object that we "see.")

From these results, the pair thinks the two paintings form a stereoscopic pair, meaning when viewed together create an impression of depth, a 3-D image of the "Mona Lisa."

The finding "is accurate in its analysis of the images and interpretation of a possible intent at a stereoscopic representation of the hands area," Martin Arguin, of the University of Montreal, wrote in an email to Live Science, after looking through Carbon and Hesslinger's journal articles on the subject.